Drums have been used for a long time for both transporting all kinds of goods and storing them. Usually, most drums are suitable for solid, semi-solid (i.e., powder) and liquid products. Because such drums are subject to very severe conditions during their transportation, these drums must be solidly built. However, it is also desirable to have drums which are light so that they are cheaper to manufacture and add less to the overall shipping costs of goods. Thus, the recent trend in drum making has been to reduce the thickness of the walls of these drums, especially for metal drums. However, naturally, this economic move led to drums that were less sturdy than the drums made of heavy gauge metals, especially around the bottom.
A further problem with metal drums has been that the drums occupy too much space when they are shipped empty from the place of manufacture to the customer, or even when they are stored. Inherently, such bulky items are costly to ship or store. One method which reduces this problem is to build drums which can be partially inserted one into the other, i.e., nested. Although some drums built previously allowed nesting at some space savings, it was found that the savings were inadequate.